


That One AU Where Karkat Falls For His Nerdy Piano Teacher

by liesunseen



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe, Angst and Humor, Illustrated, M/M, One-Sided Relationship, Piano, Stabdads, Teacher-Student Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-06
Updated: 2013-05-06
Packaged: 2017-12-10 13:33:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/786606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liesunseen/pseuds/liesunseen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No Sburb/Sgrub—humans, trolls, and carapaces all live together in (relative) harmony on the same planet, and Karkat Vantas, the adoptive hemof**ked ward of (possible?) mobster Spades Slick, definitely does not have a thing for his nerdy, college-going human piano teacher.</p>
            </blockquote>





	That One AU Where Karkat Falls For His Nerdy Piano Teacher

_Ring_. _Riiing_.

Karkat’s no. 2 pencil dropped from his mouth, hitting the notebook. It left a smudge of graphite as it landed, rolled, and fell to the floor with a clatter. A quick glance at the clock on his nightstand confirmed that… shit. Damned if he hadn’t been sitting there on his ass chewing on the accursed writing implement and spacing out for the better part of half an hour, all the while not writing this essay he was supposed to be writing. He lowered his head to stare down at his desk in bewilderment, and the now-smudged sheet of lined paper with only his name and the date written at the top stared back. Oh yeah? He thought viciously. Well you know what, fuck you, pencil. Fuck you too, essay. Fuck you most of all, doorbell.

He glanced at the clock one more time just to make sure he wasn’t seeing things. Nope. Looked like the dickbag was even earlier than usual.

“I’ll get it!” Karkat leaned sideways, half out of his chair to shout towards the door, hoping his voice would carry down the stairs to the kitchen, where his guardian no doubt had his chair tipped back with his shod feet propped up on the dining room table, huffing down his fifth or sixth cigarette of the night while scowling at the newspaper, probably chugging the whole pot of coffee Karkat had made for himself.

Grubforking hell, he’d forgotten he’d left the coffeemaker brewing. No time to even try to drink it now, he had a date with a dilapidated hunk of junk that pulled triple duty as a music-making apparatus, a dust-and-cobweb generator, andhis own personal torture device. Or, to be more depressingly accurate, with a four-eyed, beaver-toothed, stupid t-shirt-wearing, college-attending chump who didn’t even needthe money he made teaching piano. He claimed he was doing it partially for get extra credit in his music classes and partially just for fun, but you couldn’t trust those goody-two-shoe types as far as you could trebuchet them. There had to be some kind of ulterior motive. The dipshit probably fed on the frustrations and anxieties of poor unsuspecting high schoolers. Maybe he was some kind of angst-vampire. Maybe that was how he managed to be so pan-numbingly cheerful one hundred thirty-six percent of the goddamn time.

Karkat sprang from his chair, picked his pencil up off the floor before somebody stepped on it (namely him), and slammed his mostly-empty notebook shut. He practically sprinted out into the hall, taking the stairs down to the door two at a time. He did not want the dipshit to see his guardian and start asking the awkward questions everybody always thought it was somehow entirely their fucking business to ask.

Too late. Slick was holding the door open, staring blankly at the figure on the other side. The boy was holding a book of sheet music out in front of him like a shield. He was dressed in his stupid t-shirt of the day—this one had a cutesy Japanese cartoon character on it—and he also wore a decidedly uncomfortable smile.

“…Hello sir! Um, hi! Is, um. Is Karkat home?” Karkat nearly tripped and tumbled down the stairs over that “sir,” because seriously? _Seriously?_

Slick swiveled his shiny black head in Karkat’s direction as he came barreling down the stairs, wearing an “are you kidding me with this guy?” kind of look that mirrored Karkat’s opinion of the boy exactly. Karkat jumped the last two steps, lower lip curled in a snarl.

“I saidI’d get it, Slick!” Karkat raised both hands, palm-up in exasperation. “I yelled it down the stairs really loud, I swear to the mothergrub, did you even hear me? Are you going deaf or something, old man?”

“You’re too slow, pipsqueak.” Slick sneered, flicking his spidery fingers in a vague gesture at the figure still standing helplessly in the doorway. “Didn’t wanna keep what’s-his-face here waiting on the doorstep all night, he’s liable to be mugged.”

“Slow? I took like three seconds!”

“Maybe that was three seconds in spacecaseland where you come from. Jesus, you can’t even count, no wonder your grades are shit.”

“Excuse me? My grades are average! They fall within a completely acceptable bell curve! What do you know about grading metrics anyway, you went to school about a thousand years ago, that’s if they’d even invented school back then—”

“I’m John.”

Karkat and Slick paused, mouths open, mid-shout, and turned in unison towards the doorstep.

“I mean, hi, my name’s John Egbert, it’s nice to finally meet you, Mr…?” John looked like he was torn between laughing his butt off and leaping off the small concrete porch, getting back into his dusty old Honda, and rocketing away into the sunset. He was doing that ear-to-ear grin thing that put his oversized front teeth on full display. Karkat was amazed that this guy had gotten through high school without at least one of those teeth getting punched out of his face.

Slick recovered first. “The name’s Jack Noir.” He briskly extended a hand. “Call me Slick.”

“Slick. Uh. Okay, you got it.” John almost dropped his book as he juggled it from his left hand to his right, unprepared for the handshake. Karkat rolled his eyes and shuffled his feet where he stood. Well, this was all working out in exactly the way he’d hoped it wouldn’t. Though if these piano lessons were going to be a regular thing, he guessed college-boy would have to have met his guardian eventually, if for no other reason than to collect his pay.

Speaking of which…

“Oy Slick, since you’re actually home for once, are you going to pay John for these last two weeks’ piano lessons or what?”

Slick cast Karkat a look that could’ve peeled a grape and fermented it into wine. John took back his hand and started to flap it to and fro frantically.

“Hey, it’s alright Karkat! I’m good on money, he doesn’t have to pay me till the end of the month.”

“What? No, c’mon that’s ridiculous. How far did you drive to get here?” Karkat jerked his chin in the direction of John’s car. “Don’t you need gas to power that thing? Doesn’t gas cost, oh I dunno, money? Slick, just fucking pay the kid, you cheapskate.”

The flat, featureless spot in the middle of Slick’s face that would’ve been a nose if he’d been a troll wrinkled, but he fished his wallet out of his back pocket despite John’s continued protests. “Alright, alright already. How much do I owe you now?” The wrinkles deepened as he opened the wallet. “Shit, I’ve only got singles. Don’t suppose you take plastic?”

Karkat groaned and smacked himself on the forehead.

“You mean like a credit card? Oh, sure! That’s no problem at all.”

Karkat let his hand slide down his face, uncovering his eyes so he could see. “Huh?”

Slick echoed, “Huh?”

“Yeah, I can just hook up Square to my phone. Gimme a sec!”

“You can what.”

Karkat and Slick watched in distrusting fascination as the still-smiling college boy performed some kind of wizardry on his iphone, authorizing it to swipe credit cards via a little plastic piece of crap on the end of what looked like a headphones jack. He had Slick sign his name on the screen with a pen stylus (once his chitinous finger proved incompatible with the touchscreen), and even emailed him a proper receipt once the payment went through.

“Huh.” Slick looked as close to impressed as Karkat had ever seen him. “Technology.”

“Can I get a smartphone?” The tightwad was going to say no like he always did, but Karkat figured it couldn’t hurt to ask again.

“No. Ask me one more time and your ass is grounded for the rest of ever.”

Shit.

“Whatever. C’mon, let’s learn some fucking piano already, for crapsakes.” Karkat grabbed a handful of the back of John’s stupid anime t-shirt and dragged him towards the stairs.

“Thanks, it was nice to meet you, Mr. Vantas!” John waved cheerily as he allowed himself to be dragged. “Er, whoops! I mean, Mr. Noir.”

“It’s Slick. Get it right or I’ll shank you in the back of the knee.”

“R-right! Sorry!”

“Means he likes you,” Karkat reassured him. “Jackass never bothers to threatens to shank a guy if he actually plans to do it.”

“Well duh! He’d go to jail if he really tried to do that!”

“Not necessarily.”

“Um… huh?”

Back in Karkat’s room, John lifted the cover on the two-billion-year-old artifact that was barely in good enough condition to be classified as a “piano,” and started setting up his creased old music book on the stand. In the meantime, Karkat snatched a few articles of dirty laundry off the floor, flinging them behind his recuperacoon where they’d at least be out of sight. In the back of his mind, he wondered why the boy even bothered bringing that music book with him every time. For one, it looked careworn, pages stained and crinkled; it was probably a cherished family heirloom. In this neighborhood, such an obviously precious item was just begging to be pilfered by a blueblood gang and pitched into the sewer, or torn in half and stomped on, or set on fire. That would’ve been Karkat’s luck anyway, had it been his. The usual bullies were mostly Karkat’s own age, but the troll doubted that they’d hesitate to beat up on a college kid, if he was just a measly human.

More to the point, he wondered why the boy kept bringing that book because he knew they were just going to be going over mindless, skullfuck-boring scales for a whole hour anyway.

“So hey, about Mr. Noir…”

“Slick.” Karkat’s teeth gritted. Oh boy. He knew where this was going.

“Right… Slick. Is he like, your dad or something? Or, you know, your…”

“Christ on a cracker, no, he’s not my lusus. Does he look like a big dumb melanin-deficient brute to you?”

“Haha, no, he kinda looks more like a carapace. That’s why I was asking!” John was scratching the back of his neck. “I just thought maybe he could be, like I wasn’t sure whether carapaces could maybe become lusii… I mean, I think I saw a movie about that once?”

“Are you talking about ‘In Which a Young Grub Barely Survives Her Subjection to Dubious Guardianship, Containing Six Instances of Onscreen Bleeding and Gratuitous Song-And-Dance Numbers, etc., etc.? That black-and-white piece of garbage from the fifties?” 

“Yeah, that’s the one! I think we saw that in school when I was about your age.”

“Okay, that movie was about a human becoming a lusus, not a carapace. And you do know that that movie’s widely considered to be a load of speciesist-as-fuck, anti-human propaganda, right?”

“Yeah I know, we saw it in social studies class when we were covering the Purge and the fall of the last troll empress. I guess your class hasn’t gotten that far yet. What year are you in again?”

“Junior.” Karkat sighed inwardly and pretended to be absorbed with collecting every notebook, pencil, pen, eraser, and crumpled-up sticky note from his desk and shoving them into his backpack. He didn’t need any of it for school tomorrow, it just gave him something to do with his eyes. “My ‘real’ lusus was a giant crustacean-type, they don’t live for very long out of the water. That’s why they don’t usually bond with grubs. But I’ve actually got this… kind of fucked up hemotype, so none of the others wanted to take me.” 

“That’s awful!”

Karkat stood and dusted off his pants, still not meeting John’s gaze, though he could feel it burning a hole in the back of his shirt. “Crabdad and Slick were bar buddies, so he talked him into adopting me right before he died. Or, he might’ve bribed him. Or beat him in a game of cards, who the fuck knows. Anyway, I guess that makes Slick my godfather or whatever, that’s what humans call it, right?”

“I see… Man, I’m sorry to hear about your crabdad. But, heh—‘godfather!’ That’s funny, because Slick kind of looks like an old-timey mobster. I mean, not in a bad way! He seems like a pretty cool guy, you know? I like his hat, it’s spiffy. My dad wears that same kind of hat too, except he’s got a white one. Hmm, you think I should get a cool hat too?”

Karkat deposited himself on the piano bench with a heavy _thump_ and allowed his head to drop onto the keys with a musical _clunk_. “No. No, no, no. Nobody between the ages of fourteen and thirty-four should be allowed to purchase, own, or God forbid, wear, a fedora. They just scream ‘douchenozzle’ on anybody who’s not old enough to be exempt from fashion critique.”

John sat down next to him, laughing heartily. Karkat’s spine bristled. It kind of skeeved him out to have somebody sitting so close to him, all up in his personal space, maybe an inch away. Nobody else did that. Slick didn’t do that. 

He could feel the other boy’s body warmth from that distance, could make out his eyes, a weird shade of deep blue behind his thick-lensed nerd-glasses, a color that looked out of place on a Hawaiian or Pacific Islander or whatever type of human John was. At first he’d thought those had to be contact lenses, but that didn’t make sense considering the huge glasses. John didn’t look like the type of guy who’d wear colored contacts, anyway. He looked more like the type of guy who’d wear a t-shirt with a ridiculous green blob monster plastered all over the front of it.

“So we’re just going to do some more scales today, okay?”

Right, piano lessons. Right, that was what John was here to do. Teach him piano. Right.

“Ugggh. Getting so bored with these goddamn scales.” Karkat thunked his head on the keys once more on his way up for good measure.

“I feel you, buddy. But you just gotta suck it up and do them! That’s how you learn music—pain.” He put a hand on Karkat’s shoulder. “Cheer up! Soon you’ll graduate to chords, and then the next step after that is songs. Real songs. Not like ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ type songs, I won’t do that to you, promise.” He had his hand on Karkat’s shoulder, what the fuck. Karkat tried his best not to squirm. The touching. Always with the touching. John was a toucher.

“How long does it take to get good at this whole piano business, anyway?” Karkat managed to subtly shake John’s hand off his shoulder by pretending to stretch his arms over his head and to crack his knuckles. They wouldn’t crack. He’d never gotten into the habit, that was a little awkward, oh well.

“It really depends on how much you practice.” John shot him a teasing smile. “You have been practicing this stuff, right?”

Karkat looked down at the keys and swallowed his desire to blurt _every night_. “Yeah, I practice sometimes. But I don’t feel like I’ve been getting any better.”

“Haha, dude, it’s only been two measly weeks!” The boy quirked an eyebrow. “What do you mean by ‘good at,’ anyway? Like, if you want to perform a concerto on stage in front of a live audience of rich-ass snotballs or something like that, well, that’s going to take years. And by years, I mean _years and years and years_. Decades! But, if you just wanna play something like…”

Without engaging in any shoulder-stretching or finger-cracking exercises whatsoever, John summoned a super sped-up version of _Fur Elise_ from the depths of the moldy wooden beast, fingers whirring across the age-yellowed ivories and ebonies with practiced ease, no hesitation, not one single mistake. Karkat felt his face growing hot as he watched the boy’s fingers dance across the keys, almost faster than his eyes could follow. _He_ wasn’t even looking at what he was doing, the bastard. Holy shit.

“…you should be able to tackle that pretty much before you know it!” John finished with a one-handed flourish and a bucktoothed grin, and Karkat could physically feel his self-esteem draining from his body and puddling on the floor between his feet. No way a screwup like him would ever be able to play like that. Maybe he could learn the song, but there was something about John when he played, a certain style or air he gave off, that Karkat knew he couldn’t replicate even if he did learn to play a whole concerto. It was like the piano transformed him. He just looked. He looked. Really…

Oh hell no. Not this train of thought again. Karkat smashed it away, back to the furthest recesses of his cranium where he stored the names of all six-hundred and fifty original Fiduspawns and song lyrics from bands he refused to admit he still liked. Begone, unwanted thoughts. Away with thee.

“So how long is ‘before you know it?’ Because that’s a pretty vague fucking time estimate if you ask me.”

John raised his hands as if warding off a blow. “That’s such a hard question to answer!” Lowering his hands, he began stroking his chin, thoughtful. “For me, it took… three years? I think? But I’ve heard that for some people, it can take as many as five years. And this one girl I know learned it in under a year! But she’s, um, kind of a genius?”

Karkat nodded. Five years for him, he thought, resigned. Maybe six or seven. Or never. Maybe never.

“Aww, cheer up! It won’t feel like a very long time, promise!” John was patting him on the back now. Karkat made a valiant effort not to jump right out of his turtleneck. Touching. Ugh. “That’s not the right way to think about this, you know. If you really like playing piano, then getting to be really great at it is all about having fun on the journey. Haha, I know that sounds corny as hell, but it’s true.” He ruffled the troll’s hair. Like, what older brothers did to younger brothers on TV, he did that.

“Uhh… whatever you say.” Karkat shook his head like a dog and compulsively raised both hands to comb out his hair, like he thought John might’ve left a finger in there or something.

“Oops, sorry. Did I mess up your ‘do?” Augh, who even said things like that. “I just couldn’t help myself, you have cloud hair.”

“The fu… _cloud hair_?”

“Yeah! Super-fluffy! I wish I could get my hair to defy gravity like that.”

Karkat spluttered and waved his arms around, but neither the noise nor the gesture ended up being even remotely intelligible. John snorted, and pointed at the piano.

“Shh, Karkat. Shhh. Only scales now.”

Right. Scales.

Karkat resolved to forget about all of the stupid things going on in his head, and to just lose himself in the lesson. In the scales. John pulled up a metronome app on his iphone (fucking smartphones, god _damn_ he would give his right horn and maybe half his bulge for one), and began the lesson, talking him through c-major to c-minor and back again, over and over and over and freaking over. Karkat’s right hand was getting to be pretty okay with this routine, but he kept screwing up the fingering on his left. John was endlessly patient, voice almost hypnotic, the proverbial calm to Karkat’s storm of cursing and flailing and starting over from scratch.

“Whoops, hehe, tangled up your fingers again buddy.”

“Oh my God, this fucking—”

“Start over. With your pinky—”

“I know.”

“—on the C. After you play the G with your thumb, cross over with your middle finger and play the A.”

“I know, I know.”

“Aww, don’t give the poor piano the finger! This old girl’s working real hard for you.”

“This old girl can work real hard at sucking my nook.”

“Ooh. Kinky.”

“Shut up!”

“Whoa, you’re the one who said the thing, not me.”

After the thirty-minute mark, John gave Karkat a break to massage his fingers, which he did eagerly, complaining under his breath all the while. John took the time to answer a few text messages on his phone. Something one of his buddies had sent him made him laugh out loud.

“Oh my God, Dave! You did not really just say that!”

Karkat took a break from his complaining to look confused. “Who’s Dave?”

“Oh, sorry. Just some asshole buddy of mine, you know?”

Karkat nodded. The only people he would qualify as buddies were also definitely assholes, so…

“Wooow. Okay. What? Holy… Oh my gosh, wait till Rose hears about this.”

Frowning, feigning disinterest, Karkat pulled his own piece of shit palmhusk from his back pocket and checked his message box. Empty, except for about six texts from fucking Gamzee, probably high as a kite on sopor and ranting on and on about the joys of brotherhood and miracles, as usual. Karkat deleted those without reading them. 

When he was on one of his “up” swings, Sollux would text him all the time just to shoot the shit and make fun of his computer programming abilities, but he must’ve been on one of his “down” swings right now because there’d been no word from him for days. And he’d been skipping school again. Psionics, what could you do? Terezi used to text him too, but nowadays she was busy running her after-school FLARP campaign, and playing in her two-girl punk band with that bitchy bitch Vriska. What’d they call themselves again? The Scourge Sisters? Lame.

“About ready to get started again?”

Whoops. While he’d been spacing out staring at his empty inbox, John had already put his phone back on the music stand with the metronome app on, paused. Karkat snapped his husk shut and crammed it back into his pocket, trying not to feel guilty, like he’d just been caught checking his phone in class or something. John wasn’t a real teacher. Not like he could put him in detention or something.

“Yeah, all set. Let the clunking mess commence. Woohoo. My favorite thing.”

“Haha. Hey Karkat?”

“What.”

“Do you even like the piano, or is your da… lusu… _guardian,_ just making you take these lessons?”

Karkat blinked. He hadn’t been expecting that question at all.

“Um… no? I mean, no, Slick’s not making me take lessons. He’s the one who hates the piano. It came with the place, belonged to the old oliveblood who used to live here. Slick wanted to throw it away, I had to beg him to keep it, and then he was all like, ‘Fine, but it’s going to stay in your room, out of my sight, and I swear if you play it late at night I will poison your sopor and kill you in your sleep, blah blah whatever,’ who even cares.” 

Karkat snapped his mouth shut, face coloring, suddenly aware of the fact that he’d been rambling on. That was a bad habit of his he’d been trying to kick, as lately his rants had earned him highblooded fists to the mouth more often than not. John had the look on his face that people got when they watched purrbeast videos on trolltube, and it was making Karkat six different kinds of extremely uncomfortable.

“Haha, so you actually do like piano?”

Karkat nodded.

“Me too! It’s my favorite instrument.”

No shit, dumbass. Karkat continued nodding. He refused to break eye contact.

“What got you interested in piano, though? I’m curious.”

“Uhh, well in _Pretty Woman_ there was this piano scene—”

“Oh my God, seriously? You like that movie?”

“Hey, shut the fuck up! It was really romantic and I don’t give a fuck what you think.”

“Oh no, it was a good movie. But didn’t the guy barely even play the piano in that scene? I thought he was too busy—”

“Okay shut up, forget I mentioned it, I didn’t even expect you to have seen that movie or know what I was talking about—”

“Wow, that is seriously adorable. You’re actually a pretty sensitive guy underneath your angryshell, Karkat. Hey. Heeey, I think I know what’s going on here. Are you trying to learn piano to impress some girl?”

“No, there is no girl whatsoever. Shut. Up. Forever. We are never talking about this again, or your ass is fired, and Slick is gonna find out where you live.”

“Ahahaha. I knew it.”

For the first time since his piano lessons had started, John opened the book and showed Karkat what the scales he'd been playing looked like on paper, tracing the notes across the page with one finger as Karkat played. Lines and symbols and numbers... it meant nothing to him. Karkat tried to follow along without looking down at his hands. He mostly failed.

 John’s hand was on his shoulder again. This time, Karkat didn’t try to shake him off.

John was weird. He was also a nerd. Meaning, smart enough to get into college, he guessed. Mature enough to handle himself there. Motivated enough to have a job on the side, well-off enough to not even need the money. He was a lot of things that Karkat would never be. Such as, talented. Seriously talented. 

At the end of his lesson, Karkat asked if he could play _Fur Elise_ again, regular speed this time, in full. John gladly complied, and Karkat already knew the melody would be stuck in his pan all weekend, on repeat, just those notes over and over. It sounded so different when somebody was playing it live, like it was a brand-new song. Karkat swore he’d learn to play it someday, even if he had to sell his soul.

"Shoot, it's getting late. I've got to go, finals are coming up, I've got like six papers to write." John was leaving. Karkat felt a strange tightness in his chest.

"Yeah, me too. Have papers to write, I mean. Paper. A paper. Singular." That failed to sound impressive. Karkat wished he could go back in time and have not said anything.

"Oh, no kidding? What subject?" John stood, lifted the sheet music booklet they hadn't even used out of the stand and closed it, turning to give Karkat this interested smile, like he really cared. Karkat was aware of his face feeling hot again.

"It's, uh. Math."

"Haha! Ouch, they're making you write papers in math? When I was in high school, we just had to solve equations."

 _When I was in high school_. He made it sound like it had been ages ago. How old could John possibly be, anyway? Karkat was sixteen; John couldn't be more than six or seven years older than him at most unless he was going for his Master's. Or had been held back a few years. He didn't look very much older, anyway.

Karkat walked John out of his room, towards the door. Despite those papers he needed to work on, John didn’t seem to be in any huge hurry to leave. He seemed to be genuinely interested in Karkat’s dumb, boring life, and the dumb, boring things he had to say. Karkat wondered if it was possible to drag a walk down a stunted flight of stairs into an hour, if one were to walk really, really slowly.

"Usually in math we just do problems out of the book, but the teacher I have this year is making us study mathematical theories. The history and the politics and all that crap. Like, who even cares? It's kinda bullshit, right?”

"Oh, like Game Theory? Are you covering Game Theory at all? Pareto Optimality and Nash Equilibriums and stuff?”

“...Huh?"

"Haha, probably not, then. I just took a class on Game Theory last semester, it’s kind of hard, but really cool! You can use it to predict economic trends, and the outcomes of wars. You know, like in the movie _A Beautiful Mind_?"

"Um."

"Ah, I guess it's a little dated now, you probably haven't seen it."

"Uh, no, but I like old movies. I’ll look it up on Netflix, do you think it’s still…?”

“Whoa, it’s not that old! Yeah, it's probably on there. Check it out!” They'd reached the bottom of the stairs. “Oh geez, it sure got dark fast. Whelp, better hit the road. See ya next week!”

Karkat wanted to ask John a million and one parting questions. What's your major? What classes are you taking? What are your parents like? What's college like? Do you have friends there? Do you have a girlfriend?

Instead, he just mumbled, "Yeah, okay, seeyah," and closed the door in John's face. 

He waited just inside the door, though, until he heard the sound of an old Honda engine rumble to life, power steering squeaking in protest as he turned the wheel, then gravel crunching as he pulled out and drove away. Karkat felt. Weird. Like a heavy weight had lifted off his shoulders, but instead of feeling free he felt empty instead. He felt cloth under his fingertips, too. Huh? Oh. He was squeezing his shoulder, the one John had touched earlier. He stopped doing that immediately.

He walked through the small, shitty living room that he and Slick barely ever used, into the kitchen, which Slick spent more time in than any room in the house.

"Did whats-his-name finally leave? Thank fucking God. All that clunking and thumping was giving me a migraine."

Slick was exactly where Karkat had left him, feet propped up on the table, except now instead of reading the paper he was watching the small TV on the countertop, crunching on a bowl of popcorn in his lap and sipping beer from a pink can cozy that boasted “2009 20k Walk for Life Participant.” Karkat had no idea where it had come from. One of Slick's drinking buddies must've left it here, as he was pretty sure that Slick wouldn’t walk 20k even to save his ownlife. He reached over to steal some popcorn, and got a slap on the wrist for it.

"Christ kid, there's like a fuck-ton of popcorn bags in the pantry, pop your own."

"I only wanted a handful!"

"Too bad, all of the popcorn in this bowl is mine."

"Argh! You bulgelicker, you drank all the coffee I made, too!"

"You know how to make more. You shouldn't be drinking coffee at this hour anyway, don't you have school tomorrow?"

"Yeah, and I've still got an essay to write!" Karkat poured ground coffee angrily into the coffeemaker and slammed the empty pot underneath. He jabbed the "brew" button and scowled as it slowly began to heat up. "Great, now I'm just going to waste more time that I could’ve used writing making another pot of coffee, fucking brilliant." This was just about the stupidest thing he could be complaining about right now, but he needed to get his mind off of _Fur Elise_ and his empty phone inbox and John’s hand, warm on his shoulder.

Slick took his time speaking again, and when he did it was through a mouthful of popcorn. "If you had an essay, why didn't you tell piano-boy to come back next week? Coulda paid him for three days instead of four, and maybe you'd have gotten your damn schoolwork done on time for once. Use your head next time, dumbass."

Karkat brandished a coffee mug at him. "I can't just blow off piano practice whenever I feel like it."

"Why not. It's just a hobby, right? Ain't like you're ever going to make money doing it."

Karkat scowled and turned back towards the coffeemaker, staring as the last drops made it through the filter as though he could make it brew faster through sheer force of will. "It's important to me. You wouldn't understand."

"Hmph." Slick gave a one-shoulder shrug and turned back to the TV. He popped another handful of kernels into his mouth and mumbled through his crunching, "You just keep your grades up, you hear? I'm not going to keep shelling out my hard-earned money to keep your crush coming around if you're bringing home C's and D's."

"What the fuck, he's not my fucking crush! And for your information, I only got one D this year! One! And that was only because—"

“Save it for never. I don't wanna hear it."

Karkat, coffee in hand, stomped out of the room, fuming. In the hallway he paused.

Crush?

No. Ridiculous. No way he'd ever crush on that dork. No way it'd ever work out, even if he did. John was probably, like… twenty-something. He had a driver's license and a car and probably lived all by himself in a college dorm, maybe even split an apartment with school buddies. He probably went to out to bars and partied with other college kids on the weekends. He probably already had a girlfriend. He probably wasn't into guys. Or trolls. Especially guy trolls. Especially guy trolls who were younger than him with abnormal hemotypes who lived in the lowblood projects with deadbeat non-lusus guardians and got shitty grades and sucked at piano and didn't even know what Game Theory was.

Shit.

Karkat paused in front of the mirror on his way to the stairs, looking at his reflection. His crow's nest of hair that refused to lay flat, or to even kink up evenly on both sides. His nubby, blunt horns. His weird eye color that’d gotten him beat up in school on a regular basis as soon as it’d started filling in his eyes, his smattering of freckles peppering his turned-up nose. Yeah. Not super desirable. Not anybody's idea of datable material.

Not that it mattered. Whatever. Whatever. He needed to write this essay and not be filled with feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem and...

Upstairs in his room, he regarded the piano and considered sitting down to play a few more scales to get his mind off things, but Slick would probably yell at him if he made any more noise. He reached over to lower the key cover. He did kind of… stroke the keys a little, beforehand. No, not stroke them, that sounded weird. He just put his fingers on them to see how it looked.

They looked stubby and ingraceful. Nothing like John's long, long fingers.

Stop thinking about John, you pathetic shit.

Karkat grabbed his notebook out of his backpack, rummaged for one of the pencils he'd crammed in there in a fit of stupid earlier, and flopped onto his back on the floor, curling up beside the warmth of his recuperacoon. Listened the gentle thrum of its cleaning filter, and sighed, remembering the noises Crabdad used to make. He wished he could get undressed for the night and bring his notebook in the ‘coon to write, but he'd probably drop it and get it all sticky, not to mention fall asleep mid-essay. Coffee. Right. He got up and retrieved his mug, took a long swig now that it was cool enough to drink, flopped back down and stared at the page of his notebook he'd written his name and the date on. He began writing more.

He wrote, “GAME THEORY” in all caps at the top of the page, and underlined it.

That was stupid. He’d planned write about the Pythagorean Theorem, which was a copout because they'd just covered it recently in class but at least he knew something about it and wouldn't have to spend all night researching. He scowled and erased, erased, erased, a lot harder than he needed to but the pencil markings wouldn't come off, this eraser sucked, cheapass pencil, cheapass notebook, _shit_. He brushed away the pencil shavings, realized he'd rubbed a small hole in the page, groaned in frustration and shoved the notebook away, flinging his arm out and laying his head on top of it in miserable defeat.

"Cull me," he moaned into the black fabric. "I am a failure. I can't do anything right. I don't have a damn clue what I want to even do with my life, and I don't have a damn thing to even live for."

John's face came to mind, and he pushed it away, because why even bother. That wasn't . He didn't even. Um.

"Dammit Slick!" He pounded his fist lightly on the wooden floor, satisfied to hear the echoing _thunk_ it made even though Slick probably couldn't hear it downstairs over the lull of the TV. "Why'd you have to go and say a thing like that? I was fine until you said that." No. No, he really hadn't been.

Pulling the notebook towards him again, he angrily wrote in uppercase scrawl: "I'M IN LOVE WITH MY NERDY PIANO TEACHER, AN ESSAY BY KARKAT VANTAS” underneath the not-really-erased "GAME THEORY" title. Then he tore out the page, snarled at it, crumpled it into a ball and pitched it towards the trash can. It bounced off the rim and skittered under the piano. Shit, now he'd have to go get it and make sure it was properly destroyed just in case Slick decided to go through his trash and never let him hear the end of it. Eat it. Burn it. Tear it into little pieces, and flush them down the load gaper. 

He'd do that later. For now, he was going to research Game Theory, and even though he'd probably get a "D" on his essay for not studying hard enough, at least maybe he'd have something to talk to John about when he came over for next week's piano lesson. Maybe he could even ask him to stay late, and they could Netflix _A Beautiful Mind_ together.

Who the hell was he trying to kid? He couldn’t just ask his piano teacher to hang out, that’d look creepy. Desperate. Sad. Shit, he could never even hope to be friends with John, let alone…

Let alone...

Peeling himself off the floor, Karkat hunkered down in front his husktop, and, hating himself a little more with every letter yet unable to stop, he typed “Game Theory” into Wikipedia’s search bar anyway, and began to read. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> This started as a doodle I made during lunch break and ended up becoming a whole Thing. First thing published on Ao3, first thing taking place in this cohabitation alternate universe I've had on the brain for awhile. I probably won't continue this particular story, but you can definitely expect more Johnkat from me in the nearish future, and probably more fics taking place in this verse down the pipeline.  
> Here's where I ramble about this AU:  
> http://liesunseen.tumblr.com/post/49751669706/ramblings-about-my-piano-fic-universe


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